Man recalls life in Palace’s stable

When Holly Springs resident Robert P. Kennel tells people he was born in a stable, he isn’t being Messianic. He really was.

Bill Hand, Sun Journal Staff

When Holly Springs resident Robert P. Kennel tells people he was born in a stable, he isn’t being Messianic. He really was.

The stable they speak of hadn’t seen a horse inside its walls in nearly 140 years.

Kennel is one of possibly only two people alive who were born in the Tryon Palace stables back in a day when George Street ran right outside and the Palace itself was only a dream.

The other surviving person who claims a birthright to the building is Frances Henderson of Change Street, New Bern.

When Tryon Palace burned down in on Feb. 27, 1798, the buildings to its west and east — the kitchens and the stables — survived. The kitchen was torn down, probably for its bricks, but the stable remained, serving various purposes over the years. In the 1830s, for instance, it was a carriage shop for the devout and beloved Robert Hay.

The building was remodeled in the early part of the twentieth century and turned into an apartment building. Kennel believes it was four apartments when he was born there on March 1, 1936. iI was a leap year, he jokes, and if he’d been born one day earlier he’d only be 20 years old today.

Frances was born there, a few years earlier on October 27, 1921.

Rent, at least in Kennel’s day, was nine dollars. His parents, Phil and Nora, moved out when he was only two years old because rent went up fifty cents and they didn’t want to pay the difference. The Kennels lived on the second floor on the right as one faces the building.

Kennel has only one memory of that place: he recalls standing at the top of a long staircase, looking down.

“Or maybe that was the apartment across the road,” he admits. “I was really young.”

Kennel’s father, a postman, had to borrow money to cover his son’s birth.

“Daddy said he borrowed 50 dollars from Morris Plan Bank,” he said. “Back in those days they took the interest out up front. So he was only given 43 dollars. So he paid 39 dollars to Dr. Charlie Ashford and Nurse Leuter to deliver me, and then the last four dollars to have me circumcised.”

Henderson, meanwhile, did relate some memories of the palace in an interview she gave in September, 2011.

“It was just loads of fun,” she said. “There were four apartments on each side and a stairway went up the middle in the hall ... We lived downstairs. My grandmother had one up above us. I would go up to see her and then I could slide all the way down the banister, sometimes from the attic.

“Then I’d get off, like riding a horse.”

Henderson remembers that “the woodwork and mantels were lovely. The flooring was very pretty.”

The apartments, she recalled, had no central heat but were kept somewhat warm with coal stoves and fireplaces.

Henderson also remembers Edgar B. Elliott, her uncle and also a young fireman who lived in the apartment with his Henderson’s grandmother. Elliott would drown while fighting a warehouse fire on the riverfront on June 10, 1931, making him the only New Bern fireman to die while fighting a fire.

“He was just a loving person,” she said. “Even when I was a little girl I could remember, when he would come in, he’d see me and hold out his arms, and I’d just run to him and he’d pick me up and flip me over my shoulders and away we would go.”

She remembers the day he died and her grandmother’s sadness. Elliott is buried beneath a large monument at the Cedar Grove Extension Cemetery.

Henderson came into the world five years later and, by the time he was three, was living in a house at the corner of Johnson and Metcalf streets.

“It was known as Color town,” he said. “We lived in the last white house, but we paid rent to a colored family. It was twelve dollars a month.”

Henderson would go on to make a name for himself in sports, graduating from New Bern Highschool in 1954 as valedictorian and all conference in baseball, basketball and football.

By then his birthplace was undergoing restoration to its original, 1770 condition.

His mother, Nora Kennel, would serve on several mental health boards under Gov. Jim Hunt, who served from 1977-1985 and 1993 to 2001. Kennel, who knows Hunt and declares himself one of his biggest fans, worked for some years to convince Hunt to put up a plaque honoring his mother in the Palace stables.

“I had a discussion in 1982 with him over lunch and told him I was born in the horse stable wing of Tryon Palace,” Kennel said. “He told me he was going to get a small brass plaque put on the second floor door to honor my mother.”

It didn’t happen in that term and Kennel said he spoke to the governor again in 1992.

“I said, Governor Jim, you are now a lawyer and a liar.You didn’t get that plaque put up at Tryon Palace.” He said the former governor tried to get released from the promise but, when Kennel refused, Hunt told him he would run for governor again.

Hunt went on to win another two terms as North Carolina governor, making him the longest-serving governor in North Carolina’s post-revolutionary history.

“I have always taken full credit for Governor Hunt’s decision to run again,” Kennel laughed.

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